Hurricane Afghanistan

"...If we thought the reporting from Iraq was atrocious, please look at what is (not) coming out of Afghanistan. At the current rate, reporting to the American public will be almost completely secondhand, regurgitated from email and phone interviews, and most embeds will be like the war tourism we so often saw in Iraq. There are British and Canadians doing more firsthand reporting, but the Americans seem to be leaving it mostly to the winds.

And so this is not a tropical storm warning. This is not a warning about high seas ahead. We are talking about Hurricane Afghanistan, without weather reporters. But if there are no cameras there to record the damage, will it really have happened? We have a military that is now very experienced in counterinsurgency. The military knows what it’s doing from the NCOs up the 4-star generals. These are among the few people I trust to know what we need in Afghanistan. They are our best, and we cannot allow them to be fed into some political meat-grinder.

As I wrote in 2006, Afghanistan is the new hot war. We are on a collision course with heavy fighting in the near future. Victory is crucial. We have our best people fighting. But we also need our best journalists and writers here. Our political process cannot be trusted. We must have public auditing in the media, or many politicians will not support our commanders, and those politicians will mangle Afghanistan like they did Iraq. Without top-notch journalism, Afghanistan could become America’s forgotten war. After we lose it."
Michael Yon